Jerusalem Mortimer wants a word

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Well, I’m a billionaire in Thai baht. I’m rising because I had a bad cold and now I seem to be getting rid of it. I’m cocky because I’ve got a cock. I am be-cocked. My cock works well, rising in the presence of submissive women who want my attention, and later it sets, like the sun.

So that’s how I got “cocky” and “billionaire” into my title. I know, though, that “billionaire” and “cocky” are two words that make me avoid a book, especially if they appear on the cover.

With “billionaire” it’s partly because it suggests the book is going to be derivative of the “Fifty Shades” books, and god knows that’s a terrible model. There’s also the way sex gets mingled with a kind of right-wing economics. No questions are asked about how the billionaire got his money, and that’s the most real human-interest part of “billionaire” to me. As well as, are they paying their share of taxes?

Instead there’s a sort of Ayn Rand approach, that the very rich have no obligations to the society they live in. They’re just desirable because they can take a girl around in their private jet or yacht, and they can take her shopping.

There’s something faintly insulting to both men and women is this sexual idolisation of the billionaire. It suggests that a man isn’t a dom because of his personal qualities, but because of his wallet. He dominates the heroine because he’s rich. Similarly, it suggests that women aren’t attracted by personality, humour, eyes, and so on, but by wallets. That’s a shallow and cynical take on human nature, and also, thank fuck, a false view. it doesn’t remotely resemble the world I live in or the dominant and submissive couples I know.

Then there’s the “cocky” thing. The attributes of the “cocky” man seem to be that he’s good-looking and really, deeply knows it. So when he does something obnoxious to the heroine at their first meeting, and she responds angrily, he knows she’s aroused by him to the point of soaking through her jeans.

So he says, “I know you want me,” to this woman he’s just met, and then, “but you’ll be begging me for it later.” And he saunters off.

A “cocky” man, encountered in real life, would be what is usually called “an asshole”.

I don’t think it’s any surprise that “Faleena Hopkins”, the woman who took out a copyright on the word “cocky”, (which she did not coin, and she was not the first to use it in an erotic romance title) and started threatening to sue other writers who use the word, reviewed Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugs” on Amazon and said it was her favourite book.

Most doms I know are trying to be decent human beings, and most submissives react to the person and not their wallet. And they struggle to work out how to be dominant and submissive together. That’s the most realistic bdsm story. It’s also, I think, the sexiest.

A friend of mine used to draw cartoons for Penthouse. One of the highlights of the day was in the morning, when the latest readers’ confessions arrived, for putting in the “Penthouse Forum” section.

Despite rumours to the contrary, the Penthouse staff never made these letters up. There was no shortage of actual readers’ contributions.

They did tend to look as if the same person had written many of them, but that was because the letter writers used to copy each other. Key phrases would recur, like “Not to be outdone, I…“, “‘Let me take care of that for you,’ she said” and “One thing soon led to another, and …” as if they were the official house style.

Anyway, the morning would start with the editor standing up and bellowing the latest letters aloud, with occasional editorial comments, and heckling from the floor.

The letters were in four main categories:

fantasies written by virgins

fantasies written by people who weren’t quite virgins but had had their eyes tightly closed during any sexual contact they’d ever had

fantasies or possible actual experiences written by people who had probably had sex and knew what genitals looked and felt like, but were the worst writers on earth

actual, credible, genuinely hot letters

My friend told me some of the best phrases from the winning entries, but I’ve forgotten most of them. However, the unchallenged winner in the third category was the guy who wrote “She gasped with joy when I put my pork sword in her love tunnel.”

When I write in my own persona, I use only the words “cock” and “cunt”.

I like the word “cock” because (just a country boy, me) it’s based on the genuine resemblance between the bobbing of an erection and the strutting walk of a farmyard cock.

Might be worth taking a pause at this point, to listen to Howling Wolf’s version of “Little Red Rooster”. (It used to annoy him that the Stones got the key changes wrong in their version. Taught Keith Richards how to play it properly when he was in London in 1971, if you’ll excuse some Howling Wolf nerdery.)

Also, cock is a thicker word than its main rival, “dick”.

Cunt, with impressive inter-gracile, sub-pudendal fossa

And “cunt” is simply the only word I know for “cunt”. It’s the correct English word, older than the language, even. It has no derogatory connotations, and it’s not a euphemism, as though cunt were a bad thing, that needed to be referred to in Latin or with a cutesy word like “pussy”.

The misogynist habit using using the word to mean “a bad, despicable person” is actually relatively recent, and I’m holding out hope that it will eventually go away, leaving “cunt” to its original meaning.

That’s why the headmaster in the “Jennifer’s pleats and pleas” story, who would be a bad, despicable person if he were real and operating in a world with any resemblance to reality, is a man who says “pussy”. Somehow, the idea that a cunt needs to be made “pretty” by giving it a name like “pussy” seems disrespectful.

It’s why I’m not surprised that when he was boasting about sexual assault, the guy who lost the popular vote in the recent US election used the word “pussy”. There’s something belittling about the word, something that tries to divest the cunt of its power. That power frightens some men. As demonstrated by the history of religion, among other things.

These are the top two shelves of the (mostly) bdsm bookcase. It starts with Taschen reprints of Eric Stanton femdom fantasies. And a shiny gold book of historical erotic photos, most of which don’t have any bdsm relevance, but it’s there to be with the rest of the Taschen books. There’s safety in numbers. As the mathematicians say.

Then Sade, Sacher-Masoch, “Walter” and his secret life (I’ve read it all, so you don’t have to: god, that man was a terrible writer), then various books of Victorian porn, and a few samples from pre-Victorian times.

The next two shelves are mostly 20th century bdsm erotica, plus two of the 50 Shades books, which I picked up off the free book exchange table at the local rail station. Plus a few non-fiction books. The wiry brass couple fucking on the upper shelf are from Mali. And the stocky fellow with a thick (but short) erection on the lower shelf is a piece of Saami art, from Lappland.

These are the two bottom shelves. On the left of the upper of these two shelves, there’s one of the very few actually valuable books or series I own. Those three volumes are the bibliographies of Henry Ashbee, possibly better known as Pisanis Fraxi. The Index Liber Prohibitorium, or Index of ForbiddenBooks, and its two successors. First editions, from Victorian times.

The very bottom shelf has various books of erotic art, including bdsm art, like the works of Guido Crepax and Milo Manara.

The thing with a Playboy Bunny Symbol is the complete set of Playboy from the 1950s, on CD-ROM. I’d get the collection for the 1960s as well, but I’ve never seen it in this format. I wouldn’t bother with the 1970s, though Robert Anton Wilson was still editing and writing there at the time. But it was an important and stylish literary mag, for a while.

The duck? He’s a reed duck decoy, First Nation art from the Canadian prairies. He’s got no business being there amongst the sex books in particular. But the duck, he just wanted to be there. Maybe he’s a mallard: they – unlike most other birds – actually have a penis.

And you need a duck, don’t you, if you want to write a rhyming poem about sex.

I was walkin’ down the road an I met a little duck.

He said, “How are ya, human, you look down on your luck?”

I said,”I saw that sexy Sally, tried to slip my nip inside her tuck;

She told me nobody loves me an I’ll never get a -” And so on.

Anyway, that’s the Concavity of Depravity, where Cinderella posed, waiting for her Prince. (Who did come.)

UPDATE:

Cinderella has naming rights, for various reasons. She tells me the whole room is the Library of Depravity, and only the sex books section is the Concavity of Depravity. That seems fine to me.

This is the sex alcove in my library. It’s been named (not by me) the Concavity of Depravity. I like it, though, so it’s become my name for the whole damn library.

Five cases of books about fucking. The case at the left, in the front, is for the pioneering sexologists: the complete works of Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Havelock Ellis, whatever I’ve been able to get of Magnus Hirschfeld, Ivan Bloch and others. Plus Shere Hite, the legendary Juliet Richters of the Australian Survey on Health and Relationships (ASHR), and various others.

That long white object on the middle shelf of that bookcase is a whalebone dildo, which is probably Indonesian in origin, and was used for pleasure and (the head is relatively small) apparently to instruct young brides-to-be on their marital duties.

The case at the front right is devoted to less pleasant topics, like diseases, rape in the family, in the community and in prison, sexual abuse of children, and other horrible things.

The case on the inside left is for historical books – Aretino, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the Memoirs of Casanova, and other good things. Also, sex work now and in the past. And pro-sex feminism, i.e. people like Lynn Segal.

At the back, shining in the light, is the (mostly) bdsm bookcase. We’ll come back to that, on Thursday.

And the inside right bookcase, which is barely visible, contains people writing Theory (i.e. late 20th century pomo wankery) about sex and gender. And writing by anti-sex feminists, glowering across at their pro-sex counterparts in the left book case.

The other day I dined at the Pelicans Club as Galahad Threepwood’s guest. Gally had left me briefly alone near the entrance, to pay out on a wager he’d taken with Rorke, the butler.

That showed the sporting spirit, but it was how I fell into the hands, or at least the ambit, of the Club Bore.

The man attracted my attention with a flap of his newspaper and a fixed stare, so I did the polite thing and approached, extending my hand. His name was Carstairs, and in seconds I realised he was not only going to address me but actually tell me anecdotes. But the eye he cast on me was definitely glittering, and there’s no escape from that sort of thing.

His story was interrupted by the vacuum cleaner, which – or who – was doing lengths of the carpet. Carstairs had taken a seat in the corner that let him monitor all arrivals and departures, but at that stage of the cleaning that meant that every pass of the vacuum cleaner began and ended at this feet. Carstairs simply spoke through the vacuum cleaner’s visitations, neither pausing nor raising his voice, and that and my own wandering attention mean that parts of the story are lost.

Carstairs’ story

In chains and the 1970s. Pelican Club stories all happen in about 1913, while Carstairs’ story seems to date from about 1870. Pardon, but your timeslips are showing.

“Africa, of course, but one of the lusher parts … downpour, so stayed in a mokhoro … sort of round hut thing … girl chained to the table leg, never got the drift of why … not a stitch on her … skin gleamed like a grand piano …

“No, no, don’t mind telling you … nuzzled at my … undid my buttons with her … worried me a bit that she’d filed her teeth … but what can a man do, if a lady … unchained her afterwards … slapped her rump, and that made her frisky …

“Absolutely true, old bean… not a bed; a sort of cot … collapsed but that didn’t stop us … then the hut fell over … sprawled in the mud …

“Crowd of angry chaps outside … supposed to stay a virgin, apparently … chased after me waving their mulamu … father stuck me to a tree … could see his point of view … hung there for eight days … only when I laughed.”

Gally rescued me at that point, and we went off to the dining room. Gally led the way like a dapper drum-major, but as he marched towards the roast lamb he threw a remark over his shoulder. “Oh, you must’t worry about Carstairs.”

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But the alternative words have their own problems. Drawers and bloomers are specific garments, and anyway they’ve passed into history. Drawers are fine for birching the maid in a Victorian role play, though a Victorian maid wouldn’t have worn them. Bloomers are for schoolgirl scenarios set no later than the 1960s.

“Underwear” reminds me of Calvin Klein, and I loathe everything about the man, the empire and his advertising.

And “underpants” isn’t a good word. I like to be as polymorphously perverse as I can, but in this context “underpants” makes me think of a woman wearing grubby grey y-fronts, and that’s not a sexy image. To me, I mean. I’m sure there’s a fan-club on the net somewhere for women wearing grubby y-fronts, and I’m not disputing their taste.

That leaves “knickers”.

Mrs Slocombe’s pussy jokes just wrote themselves. And they were crap at joke-writing.

It sounds like a word from an ancient British TV comedy, with a drunk live audience who go into hysterics every time someone said “pussy” or “bedpan”. And it rhymes with “vicars”, which is also English in an unsexy way.

But those associations are preserved in TV series that have reached Sirius and Alpha Centauri by now. And if the Sirians and Centaurians are putting up with “Are You Being Served” re-runs, then they’ve taken on the cultural burden. Their brave work allows me to forget that AYBS ever existed.

So “knickers” it is. Sexy women wear knickers, and I approve of that. Except when they don’t wear them and I approve even more.

Maybe “panties” is an awkward word because it has an overtone of childishness. Panties, the word and not the item of clothing, seems to fit the world of little girls best, along with Hello Kitty and My Little Pony, and blaming the teddybear for finishing the milk.

Though My Little Pony is cool with me.

And so are littles, who create a submissive persona out of pink icing, sparkles and balloons and what you might call emotional lability, switching from tears to hand-clapping glee at the drop of a party hat. It can be exhausting but it’s also charming, and I’m always ready to help build a fort.

Still, “panties” isn’t an adult word. But the piece of clothing, on or off an adult woman, has huge sexual significance. Men know that if a woman wears them in front of them, there’s a good chance that sex is going to happen. If she takes them off or lets them be taken off (outside of ordinary domestic contexts), then sex is happening. There are fetishes about female underwear, but they don’t need a fetish. They’re the difference between sex and not-sex, and that means that they’re sexy in themselves.

Never, ever, wear this tee-shirt if you want to get laid

So it might be the little-girl overtones of the word “panties” that makes it sound a bit creepy to some women. I know a woman who says the word always reminds her of someone heavy breathing down a phone: “panties arrrfffffff uh-herck ahhhhh panties”, and so on.

It’s not as if the word actually gets in the way. In practice. If I’m doing something bdsm-y they don’t stay on long anyway, and I’m not likely to use any particular word. I just smack her arse and say, “get those off. Now.” That works fine.

What hentai girls wear has to be called panties. But maybe that’s part of the problem with the word.

If you’d asked me why it’s awkward, a few years ago, I’d have given a vaguely feminist answer: that it’s a word for the female equivalent of a male piece of clothing that shows that it’s the female version by adding a diminutive. The diminutive form means that the women’s item is more childish and more frivolous than the male equivalent. So I’d have questioned it for the same sort of reasons that I’d question the word “actress”. Or “poetess”.

But that’s not quite the problem, I think.

Ah hell, I’m out of time again. Duties call. This blog is still alive, really, and so’s its writer. I’ll be back shortly.

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